I am creating a website for a friend that lists all upcoming events. In the course of time, my friend will need to update the info on that page (remove old events, add new events) by himself. Do i need to create a database table for that? And then, how can i link it to my webpage? I am using a template for all the common features on all my pages and have editable regions for the content of each page.

And last question, how can I give access to my friend to be able to himself update information presented on his website?

What you need to look into is called a Content Management System. There are plenty of offerings out there, just a matter of personal taste of setting up. Much more powerful that a DW template and it will allow you to give them access without your friend needing Dreamweaver:

Thanks for the list, I have no experience with CMS yet. But I'm guessing this doesn't mean that I have to throw away all that I did in Dreamweaver, right? Can I use CMS only for info updating and keep all the designing within dw?

If you use a real CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or Concrete5, you would not need Dreamweaver to maintain the site. Page creation and updates are performed in your browser by logging in to the CMS's admin panel.

I've been testing Concrete5.5 out of late and it can do excatly what you require. So can Wordpress.

I would turn each of your pages into either a Concrete5.5 or Wordpress template theme. It would then be quite simple to allow your client to add and delete event pages but leaving the pages you don't want to the client to touch uneditable. Can't think of anything worse than letting the client loose on all the page......the website will be a train wreck in no time at all. The one thing I would say is keep the pages that are going to be updated by the client as simple as possible. CMS's have their limited uses but if a page is too complex the client will have no chance of updating without breaking the design.

Wordpress documentation is shite and most of the tutorials you'll find are outdated. You'll have to look longer and harder to find anything that helps you convert your pages into a template theme. The problem is most that exist are years behind the current version of Wordpress so are useless to follow. Having said that IF you can get passed GO Wordpress will also allow you to create new pages and delete old pages quite simply.

The trick to using both Concrete5.5 and Wordpress is only implementing the bits which are applicable to your website. For instance why would anyone give the client the option of creating new main menu buttons especially in the case of a horizontal menu where the addition of a couple more navigataion tabs could blow the whole design apart. Yuk.

Thanks everyone for your ideas. I installed Joomla on localhost. I understand that I can design my pages in Joomla but since I've already created my pages in DW, I would like to keep them and just use joomla for the updatable information (like osgood_ was saying). That IS possible with Joomla, right?

If yes, how can I link DW and joomla in one project? I mean, my pages are ready in design, I just need to add the Events content, the News content, Products content... so I am assuming that I should add my content in joomla (through "add an article"???) and then link that info into my DW page on localhost? Am I anywhere close?

Don't make a great deal out of it. Create a secured backend with CRUD (create, read, update and delete) modules. This can easily be done with DW's data insert panel, insert, uodate and delete form wizards and a dynamic table to view the events. The latter will look similar to

Anb, just to clarify what's going on. When you go to a CMS, you can continue to use, and should continue to use, something like Dreamweaver to code your pages because most of the templates created by the content management systems are stored in HTML files (with the exception of CMSMS that I mentioned). So if you want to use DW with Joomla you can create and modify the template with Dreamweaver, but you would need to use the CMS for the content. So if this content is already in DW documents, you would need to copy and paste it into the Joomla Article Editor so that it shows up on your pages. This is because while the template is in HTML documents ( /templates/{template_name} ) the content is stored in the database. Also, if you need to include page specific PHP, javascript or CSS I recommend looking into a plugin called Sourcerer ( http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/edition/custom-code-in-content/5051 ). From my limited experience with Joomla that is the best extension out there for those inclusions.

Personally I've started using PyroCMS for my new projects with Wordpress on the side, although I do have a limited knowledge of Drupal (albeit more than Joomla). My issue with Joomla is that when you are designing templates, the Menus control more of the pages then the Templates do. It's a little hard to type out the understanding I have of it so far, but my templating issues with Joomla start when I hit the roadblock of how Menus control Templates and understanding Template overrides and alternative layouts (eg: layout 1 - simple, full page; layout 2 - 2 column layout). However, one plus to Joomla is that the Admin Panel is visually appealing with nice graphics, but that is where it ends.

Hopefully this makes some sense. If you have specific questions or need further help don't hesitate to ask.

This site, which I am working on as we speak, shows a more elaborate front end for the events http://eurowomen.com.au/. The backend was created in much the same way as I explained before albeit with more pleasing styling as in

I've just downloaded PyroCMS and it looks pretty good, not that I understand how it works but I'm digging around and looking for tutorials.

One thing I noticed is how do you create links to internal web pages? It gives an option to create a link outside the website itself but I can't see anything whereby you can select a piece of text and link that to an internal page, must be there but I can't see it in the editing environment?

Also do you have any information about how to integrate a static html site into this CMS. Not too much documentation or tutorials at the moment but it looks promising.

After installing Joomla on my computer, and defining my site in DW, linking the database, and starting on the CRUD path (all with your help!), I have some new questions;

I have the table “Events” which will have new records added later on by someone else. It is successfully linked to my webpage in DW, but what I can’t figure out is a way to have a ‘flexible’ table in dw that expands with the addition of new records in the table (and shrinks with the deletion of old records. That is, I want my DW table to be exactly the size of my db table with no extra empty rows...)

Is there a way to achieve this instead of having to manually add/delete rows everytime a new/old row is inserted/deleted into the table?

Another question that I have is; How can I give the content of a column in my db table as a link in DW? That is, I have this "Press Reviews" page which lists samples of press reviews and there is a "read more" statement which actually is a hyperlink, when clicked it opens the PDF file of the article. The PDF file is saved on my computer, same folder as my webpages and the link to the PDF file is stored in my db table. I need the code that reads the path(link) from the db table column and opens it when "read more" is clicked.

1. I am not familiar with Joomla, but my guess is that you should have a dynamic table, that is a table with repeating rows containing data from the database. This can easily be achieved using DW as follows

2. There should be a field in the database called link or similar where you can place the name of the document that you want to link to. This name can include the name of the folder if the folder changes from document to document as in myfolder/mydocument.pdf. Then in the dynamic table you can place the word link or similar, or even a graphic, and link that to the document, e.g. <a href='myPath/<?php echo $rs_row['myLink']; ?>Link</a>